Saturday, January 11, 2020

Yellowknife: A Novel Trip Through the Absurd

Yesterday a friend kindly sent me a recent review of my novel, Yellowknife. Written by Grace Guy, it appeared in the August 16, 2019, edition of the Yellowknifer, a newspaper published in Yellowknife, the capital of either the Yukon or the Northwest Territories, depending on your point of view. Here are a few excepts:

I cannot begin to tell you how much fun this book was to read. Written in the snappy, fast-paced, and detail-oriented way I find familiar from mystery or spy novels, Yellowknife: A Novel brings an international flavour to the local, combining the wild fantasies that some Southerners have of the North –- people cross-country skiing down Franklin Avenue to go to work –- with some more familiar exploration of the Yellowknife homeless community and the inescapable bureaucracy.

Told in four parts and spanning the separation of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife: A Novel twists the absurd perceptions some people have of the North with the truth, making the novel feel like it was set in a fantasy version of Yellowknife as opposed to the real thing. For example, there is a moment from Moyeg G. Vassanji's 2006 novel Nostalgia in which a character remarks that he is from “Yellowknife, Yukon Territory.” These odd “Nostalgia moments” are so common in Yellowknife: A Novel that it makes them feel intentional and adds a surreal quality to the novel.

Most of the novel is hilarious, usually because of the odd situations and dialogue instead of specific jokes being made, while at the same time having moments that are astonishingly beautiful or strange, making this mixed-bag of a book worth reading – both as someone who grew up here, and as someone re-discovering the history of the North.